I think a nifty tool you could make, if you are open to suggestions, would be an ?-stop/dof calculator. On my Nokia i have a tool that shows me focus length and other cool stuff related to what i am shooting. I dont know how hard it would be to make, as i only know MEL and python, But it would be a neat tool none the less. =D

I haven't done much with mel. I wrote a bitmap to particle mel thing, that created a pseudo-random z-height for each particle that also contained the x and y dim and the color of any bitmap fed into it. By simply scaling the Z axis of the particle cloud, the whole image would appear to fly from behind camera to reform the image (when the z scale reached 0.) A cheap but effective trick.

I later found that if you draw the bitmap and convert to particles simultaneously, you could do some effective "sketched clouds" sort of like zbrush, but for particles. ZIpping through a spiral galaxy is one outcome of this.

Last week's Maya work involved making blend shapes for the Chiodo Brothers and Discovery Science channel's "Science of The Movies" series. I'm sorry, I rambling on.

Ugh blend shapes, i hate working with them so much, they always seem to be very buggy for me. I tend to focus on rendering and environment modeling. The DoF mel i made was pretty cool, it used nulls linked to MentalRay Physical DOF and Physical Bokeh lens shaders to allow me to drag the focus distance instead of guess distance. I also had a null that i could use as the point at, with a toggle. I also linked controls to the MentalRay Photography shaders that would change iso and exposures based on lighting input. But the GUI i made was awful. I was working on trying to get a basic NURBS circle to show the total focus range. There was a similar tool for MaxwelRender in the plugins that put a cool green pyramid that showed the FOV of the camera, and faded from mostly transparent green to totaly clear as the focus became sharper.